The idea of love most likely relates to romantic love due to the central focus of romanticism. Though the movement itself is not merely stuck in certain forms of romantic love, when it comes to love, many people will associate it with romance. It seems our collective has lost its ability to grasp a general and universal concept on love.
What Is Romanticism
Romanticism is a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that emerged in the late 18th century. The central theme of its movement is romantic love. So it emphasized the subjectivity of humans, whether their emotions, individualistic nature, or imaginations. The nature of this movement highlights the polar opposite of the intellectual sphere of humans, our feelings sphere. Therefore, love becomes the general theme since it emerges from humans’ hearts and souls, not from their cerebral minds.
The idea of love itself became more specific since it became the glue between two people. And the journey to be together and forever in love is what romantic literature focuses on. Since then, it has become synonymous with romance. Due to its nature of subjectivity, romanticism also extended its sphere into spiritualism and mysticism, but unlike symbolism, romanticism is based on the celebration of another dimension of human, not as a way to convey meanings and concepts through symbols.
What is Love
If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the “loved” person…. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object-and that everything goes by itself afterward.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
To dissect love from romance, we need to view it from a general standpoint, not from a personal point of view. And it’s by going back to our nature as humans. To view love from a humane perspective, it is how we can see love detached from personal experience and possessions. It is to view it as a process, to relate, not only as an end point.
Universal and Transcendent
When love is viewed as a process, not an end point, it helps us to grasp the nature of love. The universality of love, just as a verb, belongs to every subject. In other words, love knows no boundaries. Everyone has the same possibilities and rights. Everyone deserves love on the same level. Perhaps this universality of love is one of the basic foundations of humanity, as is the universal love between humans.
The boundless nature of love may lead us to an understanding of its transcendent nature. Whereas it has no limit in Time and Space, love may transform and transcend every gap between humans.
Therefore, to limit love and view it as romance is to paralyze its form. To put it in a romance box is to annihilate its capacity and possibility of transcending. And it is such a waste of potential. We need to start to love, not romanticize everything. To romanticize a thing, you need a certain aspect of possession. And to possess something also means to control every possibility of it. Hence, controlling things means enforcement, not transcendence.
“Love is the bridge between you and everything.” – Rumi
Conclusion
Love is a process, a journey into oneself and into everything. It is not a static state or a fixed destination, but a dynamic and evolving experience that unfolds over time. Love is not something we find, but something we plant, cultivate and allow to flourish. It is a dance with the universe, or we may called it as a cosmic love.
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. – Rabindranath Tagore
